"Metalinguistic Negation" has been one of the
main topics in pragmatics since Horn (1985).
A great number of articles have been produced
on this topic since then. This paper closely
examines two distinctive opposite positions represented
by Horn (1985, 1989, 2001^2) and Carston
(1996, 1998, 2002), and tries to find what is the
source of the difficulty in characterizing this
phenomenon properly, which suggests another
possibility of the unified semantic meaning of
not.
Horn (1985, 1989, 2001^2) distinguish the descriptive
use of negation from the metalinguistic
use of negation, based on whether the negation
operator negates the truth-conditional content
of the proposition which it operate on, and claims
that negation is pragmatically ambiguous. Carston
(1996, 1998, 2002) argue that the essential property
of "metalinguistic negation" is that the material
falling within the scope of the negation operator
is to be understood as 'echoically used' (i.e.
metarepresentation) and propose the new term
"metarepresentational negation" for this phenomenon,
and claim that the negation operator
itself is standard descriptive truth-functional
negation even in the cases of 'metalinguistic
negation'.
This paper closely examines these two positions
and makes the points that Carston's metarepresentational
negation covers virtually almost
all the negation cases, if Givon's (1978) generalization
is correct, that Horn's descriptive/
metalinguistic distinction roughly corresponds to
her metaconceptual/metalinguistic distinction as
subtypes of metarepresetational negation. It is
further claimed that Carston's monogism on
negation is convincing, though it is hard to keep
her point as it is, considering the original logical
definition of negation.